Drama: Yet another round of United Nations climate talks ends in a mass walkout

posted at 2:01 pm on November 21, 2013 by Erika Johnsen

The “drama” in my headline is purely facetious, because really, the tremendous impotence that unfailingly results when these globalist-minded, regulation-loving bureaucrats trying to dictate top-down international standards get together is about as anti-climactic as it gets. Who knows how many more times these delegates will have to head home from these farcically grandiose conferences with nothing to show for their pains before they will finally perhaps reevaluate their strategies, but as the Financial Times pointed out in an editorial earlier this week, all these futile conferences ever seem to produce are new ideas for mutual impoverishment pacts:

Better to break a promise than to let it break you. That is apparently the view of the Japanese government, which last week said the country’s carbon emissions in 2020 would be 3 per cent higher than in 1990, not 25 per cent lower as previously pledged. The reversal, which came as the latest round of UN climate talks began in Warsaw, was widely condemned. Yet Japan has merely conceded the inevitable. The country had no plan for delivering its promised reductions – even before the Fukushima disaster closed its nuclear power stations, forcing it to burn more gas.

Instead of berating Japan for rescinding its commitments, delegates in Warsaw should turn a critical eye towards the proceedings of which they are a part. This is the 19th meeting of its kind since the process was created at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The last visible progress came in 1997 in the shape of the Kyoto protocol. But the targets were modest and applied only to developed countries, the US (then the world’s biggest polluter) refused to join, and the resulting savings have been dwarfed by rising emissions in the developing world.

Even the Kyoto Protocol, the FT editors note, hasn’t accomplished very much of anything, and searching for the next-in-line but equally ineffectual Global Climate Treaty won’t either. As if to prove the FT’s point, the two-week UN climate conference wrapping up in Warsaw this week basically fell apart on Wednesday, with more than 130 developing countries storming out when the developed nations expressed their general disinclination to funnel money out of their own countries and into developing countries’ budgets. Via HuffPo:

With two days left, there was commotion in the Warsaw talks Wednesday after negotiators for developing nations said they walked out of a late-night meeting on compensation for the impact of global warming. …

Contrasting views on what’s been said and done in closed discussions is not unusual in the slow-moving U.N. effort to curb global warming, which has often been held back by mistrust between rich and poor countries. The talks in Warsaw on a new global climate deal in 2015 have been going on since Nov. 11.

The question of who’s to blame for global warming is central for developing countries, who say they should receive financial support from rich nations to make their economies greener, adapt to climate shifts and cover the costs of unavoidable damage caused by warming temperatures. …

In Warsaw, developing nations are coming up with fresh ways to make their point. Brazil has proposed creating a formula to calculate historical blame.

“They must know how much they are actually responsible … for the essential problem of climate change,” Brazilian negotiator Raphael Azeredo said.

Developed nations blocked that proposal, however, saying the world should look at current and future emissions when dividing up the responsibility for global warming.

Essentially, developing countries (including China, by the way — evidently a major ringleader in this fruitless exercise) want prosperous countries to pay them for “loss and damage,” i.e. assume legal liability for natural disasters and give them money to build up their so-called green energy infrastructures. Why developing nations would think developed nations would agree to such a redistributive arrangement, when they are themselves mired in massive debt/economic problems and fiscal reality is now forcing them to walk back their own impractically expensive green-energy commitments (looking at you, Europe!), I have no idea.

Alas, it looks like the dream of the Great Global Climate Treaty has been thwarted once again. Sad face.

Why developing nations would think developed nations would agree to such a redistributive arrangement, when they are themselves mired in massive debt/economic problems and fiscal reality is now forcing them to walk back their own impractically expensive green-energy commitments (looking at you, Europe!), I have no idea.

In fact, just as Obamacare is little more than a government seizure of 1/6th of the US national economy and a massive expansion of wealth redistribution within the US, the ‘climate change treaties’ are little more than efforts for an authoritarian based global government to seize control of a swath of the global economy as a tool to implement wealth redistribution on a global scale.

Their roots remain in the same farces of ‘fairness’, ‘social justice’, and ‘greater good’ – just on a different scale.

We’ve always had idiots, hippies and fools enough to go around. It’s when we started to listen to them, or worse, elect them to public office and allow them to dictate policy that we lost our collective way.

The moment some egg-head starts going on about ‘settled science,’ as if true science can eve be ‘settled’ as new discoveries modify our understanding, it’s time to say, “yeah, good luck with that.,” and just walk away.

The developed nations should just walk away from this cabal of thieves and let them wither on the vine…

The PRC led about a hundred Third World countries in first demanding cash transfers to pay for “damages” from developed countries. Then led them in demanding such transfers for “historical damage”, which sounds very much like the American left’s demands for “reparations for slavery”.

And when they didn’t get either one, the PRC led them in a mass walkout.

They were all especially miffed at the Australians, whom they said sat “eating snack foods and laughing” as they bloviated, threatened, and finally flounced out in a huff. They are especially unhappy with the new Aussie PM Mr. Abbot, who called this “socialism masquerading as environmentalism” as soon as he took office and well before this conference convened. Meaning, he had their number from the start.

The PRC leading this is especially noteworthy. The largest polluter on Earth, and a rising commercial power, demanding “reparations” from its competitors. Never let it be said that the old men in the Forbidden City lack chutzpah.

I could see a war breaking out over this, as the Third World countries first seize “assets” on their soil, and then commence economic warfare against those they regard as not giving them what they are “entitled” to. (Think “Tanker War in the Gulf gone global”, etc.)

I could also see the “deep-ecos” here going to full SDS/Weather Underground mode, as they declare themselves “freedom fighters” and “Warriors For Holy Mother Gaia”, and begin the strikes against our civilization they’ve been dreaming of since they read Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and/or AlGore’s Earth in the Balance when they were in high school. Somehow, I don’t see this bunch being any more resistant to “the siren song of cleansing violence” than their mentors were when I was in K-12.

I wonder how the media will react when this lot drop their pseudo-humanitarian masks and reveal just how much they really hate the rest of the human race. Including their sympathisers in the MSM.

Who knows how many more times these delegates will have to head home from these farcically grandiose conferences with nothing to show for their pains before they will finally perhaps reevaluate their strategies,

I think you miss the point of these meetings. They are to provide job security, free travel and padded expense accounts to tens of thousands of bureaucrats and rent seekers. Having a meeting end in ‘failure’ only insures there will be another meeting next year to attend.

The orchestrated move by the G77 and China bloc of 132 countries came during talks about “loss and damage” – how countries should respond to climate impacts that are difficult or impossible to adapt to, such as typhoon Haiyan.

Who knows how many more times these delegates will have to head home from these farcically grandiose conferences with nothing to show for their pains before they will finally perhaps reevaluate their strategies,

Pains? Traveling the world on some poor taxpayer’s dime and living the high life at said taxpayer’s expense is pain? These kinds of farcically grandiose conferences will end when these people have to pay things out of their own pockets.

Ummm, are we real REAL sure there actually is any such thing as global warming or climate change? Last time I looked, the climate numbers were all either wrong or made-up. So if the United States used the same sort of calculations to reimburse the “developing” countries, then they would end up owing *us* money … which is as it should be since we’ve been pouring money into various black holes around the globe at least since WW2.